...GREEKTRAGEDY, in a puzzle that tipped its hat to the old-school tragedians, the ellipsis at the end of that clue leading to one for EURIPIDES, with OEDIPUS, SOPHOCLES, AGAMEMNON, MEDEA and AESCHYLUS elsewhere in the grid.

Sport of entries

Scorpion's puzzle in Tuesday's Independent gave its theme in the first across clue:

LANCEARMSTRONG shared space with so many derogatory entries – IMPOSTOR, FAKE, FRAUDSTER, LIAR, DECEIVER, CHEAT – that I started to wonder whether Scorpion might be a pro cyclist robbed of a title by Armstrong. Among even those entries that didn't relate to chicanery, there was more opprobrium:

13ac Bad guy essentiallystiflingsport – through abuse of this? (4)

21d What 8/12 tried to do with officials, hearingvehicle? (6)

That's DRUG and, of course, DODGEM. Dopers beware: not only might you lose your not-so-hard-earned titles; you might also find yourself savaged in an excellent and unusually angry puzzle.

Latter patter

...in a clue for RENT-A-MOB. An apparently earlier form of the phrase was used and perhaps coined in a jocose 1961 Telegraph piece by Peter Simple ...

Dictators!!! When you liberate a territory or mop up a colonialist enclave, are you disappointed and upset to receive only a tepid welcome from the people? Let rentacrowd help you! We can supply cheering crowds for all occasions.

... with the RENT-A-MOB variant popular among Oxford University activists by the early 70s. Since then, it's typically used – often in the Telegraph – to suggest that while there might be a show of feeling against, say, unpaid work experience, nobody much really cares enough to protest unless induced. Having said that, the Telegraph's Max Hastings called for students to return to the barricades in a Guardian piece headed Bring back rent-a-mob.

In a culture of deregulation and media saturation, we now suffer RENT-A-COP, RENT-A-QUOTE, and of course RENT-A-COUP, as well as a word which is the subject of this week's challenge. It's used to allege that apparent grass roots are fake and is defined by Collins as:

a PR tactic used in politics and advertising in which actors are paid to display overt and apparently spontaneous grassroots support for a particular product, policy, or event

Reader, how would you clue ASTROTURFING?

Cluing competition

Thanks for your clues for CONDIGN. The Leveson context and the first three letters lent themselves to some pleasingly topical-sounding clues, like drawfull's "New probe into Tory right" and MarkAndInwrdlyDigest's "Tory followed by Director-General in shift to right".

Also enjoyable were the misleading surfaces of wellywearer2's "In an archdeacon, dignity is fitting" and harlobarlo's "Proper daughter, saturated with mixed gin and tonic, loses it".

The runners-up are RolandDenison's fitting "Account doing one even justice" and gleety's elegant "This sentence is exactly the right length"; the winner is CasusPacis' phrase, which might have come out of a summary of the inquiry: "QC drops question on senior policeman – Guardian extremists justified".